The D/s Blog

Chapter One-5

And so he has successfully pushed against these limits and overcome them. But does he then rest on his laurels? Or does he press on, discovering another area where her submission is less than perfect? It’s unlikely, isn’t it, that her desires will perfectly overlap with his? He likes to spank, she likes to be spanked. But is she equally enthusiastic about every spanking implement? Or does she perhaps relish the tawse rather more than the dreaded cane? If so, he will work on this, so that even if she never comes to love the cane exactly, she will not shrink from it but accept it. And then, having achieved that, he will find something else to work on. There is always a new frontier to be crossed.

Perfect submission is a bit like heaven, at least in the traditional fantasy of choirs of angels plucking their harps and fluttering their wings. Sounds a bit boring to me. One might have her perfect subjugation as a goal. But do you ever want to get there? Because what then?

Frustrations of Submissive Women

I’ve had several D/s relationships. I’m grateful to each and every one of the women I was involved with. They taught me much, they gave me much. They are a varied group, differing widely in personality, in appearance, in experience. Beyond the obvious fact that they are all submissive, they don’t have much in common. But there’s one thing they all shared. Each and every one was married to a man who either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand their sexuality. I guess that’s why they found their way to me. If they had been sexually satisfied in their marriages they wouldn’t have needed what I offered them. (If your first and only response to the idea that women would stray outside their marriages for s****l satisfaction is moral outrage, then this is not the book for you.)

It wasn’t that they hated their husbands. Obviously if they had then they would have left the marriage. Things were tolerable enough to remain. Some of them would say they loved their husbands, others that they at least liked them, more or less. In one case I think she stayed mainly because of her children. But the s*x wasn’t working, not for any of them. All these women had made some sort of effort to talk to their husbands about their needs. They had made sometimes very explicit, sometimes rather coded attempts to describe what it was that they needed to obtain s****l satisfaction. A couple of them had persuaded their husbands to try a little recreational spanking. But it hadn’t worked. It never does if the woman thinks it’s being done just to please her. If the domination isn’t real, just play-acting at causing her pain or humiliation and not really imposing control on her, then it’s hopeless. It’s worse than trying to spank yourself. It’s my experience that if the man is not wired up to want to spank, you will never make him into a Dom. With some men, though the latent dominance is well hidden, with patience and understanding the woman may be able to bring it out. But if it’s not there in the first place you can’t put it there.

One or two of the husbands reacted with ridicule. I can’t imagine anything more deflating than summoning up the courage to talk about something so intimate, a subject set within a minefield of embarrassments and misunderstandings, and then finding that your attempt to reach out and establish genuine communication is met only with an incredulous snort of laughter: “You want me to do what?!” All too often the man thinks that a woman’s desire to be dominated sexually is weird, totally incomprehensible, or else that it is sick and perverted. Or perhaps the man is simply indifferent to his partner’s s****l needs. He really doesn’t much care if she is getting what she wants.

You might wonder why these women had gotten into these marriages in the first place. They were all intelligent, none of them down-trodden. How did they end up married to men who weren’t on their wavelength sexually? I think, risking a generalization, that when they got married s*x wasn’t the main thing for them. I don’t mean they didn’t like it, but maybe they thought other things were more important: emotional security, financial security, a social position, companionship, having babies. You know how it goes. s*x with their husbands was something they did in order to get the other things. It wasn’t really something they did for themselves. Perhaps it became, as it so often does, a currency, or even a weapon; something you use to get something else. Can you honestly say, ladies, that you have never withheld s*x as a form of punishment, or as a strategy of passive resistance against a man who wasn’t behaving as you wanted? Or have never used it as a reward, for letting you buy that dress, for taking out the garbage or being nice to your mother?

But then, with these women, time passed and in their mid-thirties or later they started to feel differently about s*x. They got more interested in it. They started wanting it more and wanting it differently. They began to realize that what they wanted was a really hard spanking (or to be tied up, or made to eat their dinner off the floor like a puppy dog, or whatever). Offering themselves up totally to a man, submitting to him, was having s*x for its own sake, for their own sake, not a way of gaining power in the marriage, or compensating for the lack of it. By conceding power over their sexuality, they attained it. Their need for this was so strong that all of them were prepared to risk their marriages.

I’ve had women in such situations say to me, I feel selfish wanting these things, why can’t I be satisfied with what I’ve got? He’s a good husband in other ways, it’s just that he can’t or won’t deliver what I need sexually. I’m wary of giving advice. I don’t necessarily know these women intimately; all I know is the little they tell me. So it’s not my part to recommend a particular line of action. Maybe it’s right for them to take the unselfish route and deny themselves s****l satisfaction. But I don’t think they’d be writing to me in the first place if they were at peace and had learned to live with an unsatisfied libido.

Greedy and Needy

One of the characters in John Updike’s novel Villages remarks that most women would rather be hit on the head than ignored. This may be a touch extreme, but I think I know what he means. Is it not the perennial cry of women the world over that men don’t talk to them, that men don’t listen to them, that they don’t notice? Only a couple of weeks back I was having lunch with an old and dear woman friend and I remarked that she had highlights in her hair and how pretty it looked. I thought I might get points for observation. “Oh, men,” she said witheringly. “I have always had highlights in my hair.” She then went into a highly abstruse discourse on the technical aspects of hair-tinting, explaining that although there had been some minor changes since the last time I saw her, I had failed to observe what was to her blindingly obvious. She was not about to let me off the hook.

If women are greedy for attention, how much more so are submissives? How they yearn even for a look from their Dom, how they crave his undivided attention. They don’t just want him to tie them up and spank their bottoms till they squeal or torment their n*****s till they whimper. Of course, they want that, any time it’s available. But they want more, so much more. I think what many submissives want above all is to live within a regime of strict control. Not that everything they do is subject to their Dom’s approval; some submissives don’t want every aspect of their lives to be subordinated to his whims and wishes. But what they do want is to feel that a framework is in place. They want to know that he cares enough to give them instructions, however mundane. It might be red varnish on your toenails today. It might be wear the bracelet I gave you. It might be, at precisely 3pm say out loud, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, “I belong to Master. He owns me utterly and completely.” Maybe he has her kneel for five minutes every day. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, like three blow-jobs before breakfast. It can be anything, just so long as it means he is paying her attention. And of course, he will have to follow up. Did you kneel today? Where’s your bracelet? Instructions are worse than useless if they aren’t policed.

I don’t say these little things will be enough. Whatever you give her it will never be enough. If you want to be a good Dom you will have to learn that. Submissives, in my experience, are all high-maintenance. It’s in the maintenance that she finds her true self and the Dom finds his pleasure. If you can’t be bothered with all that, don’t try to be a Dom. But I think a little and often, rather than a heavy session of discipline once in a blue moon, is what most submissives thrive on.

Submissives are needy because they make themselves so vulnerable. They open themselves up so, and if what they want to give is ignored, they can suffer severely. The worst thing a Dom can do is withdraw from her. Punishment through silence is the worst form of cruelty, and no Dom should ever stoop to such a thing. If she has done wrong, talk to her, chide her, scold her, humiliate her if that is what she needs, and punish her when she accepts that she deserves it. But don’t ever ignore her. Don’t shut her in a cold, dark cell of silence. A submissive’s worst nightmare is to be abandoned, without explanation, without appeal, without hope.

***

I used to think, in my salad days when I was green in judgment, that the spectrum of submissiveness ran from, on the one hand, the girl who thought it was a giggle to be put over her boyfriend’s knee now and again and receive a few swats with the flat of his hand, and even perhaps, if either was feeling especially daring, on her bare bottom, her knickers about her ankles; while at the other extreme was the submissive whose deepest, darkest desire was to be locked in a cage all night, taken out only to be savagely whipped, or perhaps offered to other men as their plaything. Doubtless there are even more extreme things than that. I’m sure you all have your favorite ways of scaring yourself deliciously half to death.

But I see things differently now. For me the real distinction is not between varying degrees of appetite for pain or humiliation. What interests me is the extent to which she wants to involve her whole self in the experience. Some women just want to be bottoms. Even if they crave a really severe beating, once it’s done they revert quickly to everyday life. But increasingly the kind of submissive who most interests me is the one who longs for a total experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to last 24/7; indeed, unless you haven’t got much else going on in your life this is not very practical. But while the action continues she wants to be the very centre of her Dom’s world.

Here’s another thing I used to think. I believed that a submissive wanted nothing but to please her Dom. I believed altruism and submissiveness went hand in hand. But that’s a superficial view. In fact, it now seems to me that the more submissive a woman is, the more what she is really seeking is to have her narcissism indulged. What she wants, while it lasts, an hour, an afternoon, a weekend, is that her Dom, while pleasing himself to the full, does not take his eye off her for a moment. Don’t get me wrong; narcissism in s*x is good; in fact, it’s essential. We all need to find someone who will allow us to be the centre of their obsession. Submission is not about self-abnegation; quite the opposite. It’s about self-fulfillment. You concede control; but only so that he will take full advantage. Both Dom and sub gorge on each other’s need.